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Related papers: Towards Better Understanding of In-Context Learnin…

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In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the process of adding a small number of localized examples from a training set of labelled data to an LLM's prompt with an objective to effectively control the generative process seeking to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Manish Chandra , Debasis Ganguly , Iadh Ounis

In-context learning (ICL), which promotes inference with several demonstrations, has become a widespread paradigm to stimulate LLM capabilities for downstream tasks. Due to context length constraints, it cannot be further improved in spite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jiahao Li , Quan Wang , Licheng Zhang , Guoqing Jin , Zhendong Mao

Large language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning, where they learn to solve tasks given a few examples. Recent work has shown that transformers can be trained to perform simple regression tasks in-context. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Hrayr Harutyunyan , Rafayel Darbinyan , Samvel Karapetyan , Hrant Khachatrian

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yongyi Yang , Hidenori Tanaka , Wei Hu

Large language models have transformed natural language processing, yet supervised fine-tuning (SFT) remains computationally intensive. This paper formally proves that capabilities acquired through SFT can be approximated by a base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Asankhaya Sharma

Recent research has investigated the underlying mechanisms of in-context learning (ICL) both theoretically and empirically, often using data generated from simple function classes. However, the existing work often focuses on the sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Ziqian Lin , Shubham Kumar Bharti , Kangwook Lee

Test-time training (TTT) methods explicitly update the weights of a model to adapt to the specific test instance, and they have found success in a variety of settings, including most recently language modeling and reasoning. To demystify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Halil Alperen Gozeten , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Xuechen Zhang , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Marco Mondelli , Samet Oymak

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Lingyu Gao , Aditi Chaudhary , Krishna Srinivasan , Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuxiang Zhou , Jiazheng Li , Yanzheng Xiang , Hanqi Yan , Lin Gui , Yulan He

In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) with demonstrations. However, obtaining these demonstrations primarily relies on manual effort. In most real-world scenarios, users are often unwilling or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Jinglong Gao , Xiao Ding , Lingxiao Zou , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL): they can adapt to a task with only a few examples given in the prompt without any parameter update. However, it is unclear where this capability comes from as there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Yanda Chen , Chen Zhao , Zhou Yu , Kathleen McKeown , He He

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Recent progress has rapidly advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying in-context learning in modern attention-based neural networks. However, existing results focus exclusively on unimodal data; in contrast, the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Nicholas Barnfield , Subhabrata Sen , Pragya Sur

Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning abilities, prompting the exploration of in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) to extend the promise to decision domains. Due to involving more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jinmei Liu , Fuhong Liu , Zhenhong Sun , Jianye Hao , Huaxiong Li , Bo Wang , Daoyi Dong , Chunlin Chen , Zhi Wang

Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Louis Kirsch , James Harrison , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Luke Metz

Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yuxin Dong , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu , Xia Ning

Autoregressively trained transformers have brought a profound revolution to the world, especially with their in-context learning (ICL) ability to address downstream tasks. Recently, several studies suggest that transformers learn a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Chenyu Zheng , Wei Huang , Rongzhen Wang , Guoqiang Wu , Jun Zhu , Chongxuan Li

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability for large language models (LLMs) to adapt to downstream tasks by leveraging a few (demonstration) examples. Despite its effectiveness, the mechanism behind ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Pengfei He , Yingqian Cui , Han Xu , Hui Liu , Makoto Yamada , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing